Dell Storage Manager SC Series vLAB - Amazon S3 · 1.5 – PS Series Management within Dell Storage Manager 1. Right click Dell Storage and chose PS Series. The Add PS Group wizard

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Dell Storage Manager SC Series vLAB SC 7.0 Mangement via Dell Storage Manager

Dell Confidential

Document Version 2 Sections 0 Date: May 2016

Dell | Global Sales Learning & Development


Page 2 of 74 Dell Confidential

Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... 2

1 - Demo Session 1 - SC ease of use and volume management ................................................................ 4

1.0 – Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 4

1.1 - Signing into the Dell Storage Manager GUI ............................................................................................ 7

1.2 – Reviewing the Dell Storage Manager Interface ................................................................................... 7

1.3 – Reviewing the Dell Storage Manager Web Interface ..................................................................... 10

1.5 – PS Series Management within Dell Storage Manager ..................................................................... 14

1.5 - Creating a new SC series volume ............................................................................................................ 20

1.6 - Mapping the volume to a server ............................................................................................................... 21

1.6 - Viewing the volume in Windows ............................................................................................................ 23

1.7 – Using Deduplication and Compression ............................................................................................... 27

2 - Demo Session 2 - Data Protection ................................................................................................................... 31

2.0 - Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 31

2.1 - Creating a Manual Snapshot ...................................................................................................................... 33

2.2 - Using the Manual Snapshot to recover from data loss ................................................................. 34

2.3 - Deleting the Manual Snapshot volume ................................................................................................ 38

2.3 – Showing how to set and use a Snapshot Profile ............................................................................. 39

2.4 - Creating a Replication ................................................................................................................................... 41

2.4 - Creating Cross Platform Replication (XPR) between a SC and PS array ................................ 43

2.5 - Viewing Replications..................................................................................................................................... 46

3 - Demo Session 3 – Live Volume ....................................................................................................................... 48

3.0 - Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 48

3.1 - Creating a Replication ................................................................................................................................... 49

3.2 – Converting a Replicated Volume to a Live Volume ........................................................................51

3.3 – Converting a Live Volume to Synchronous mode ......................................................................... 54

3.4 – Using Live Volume to swap Primary Storage Center .................................................................... 55

4 - Demo Session 4 - Reporting, Alerting and Managing ............................................................................ 56

4.0 - Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 56

4.1 - Using Dell Storage Manager for monitoring and alerts ................................................................. 58

4.2 - Monitoring performance ............................................................................................................................. 60

4.3 - Performing real-time analysis ................................................................................................................... 62

4.3 – Using performance Quality of Service ................................................................................................. 63




4.4 - Configuring Alerts and Thresholds ......................................................................................................... 68

4.5 - Querying past events .................................................................................................................................... 69

4.6 – Dell Storage Manager Reporting ............................................................................................................. 69

4.7 – Optional Lab - Using the Chargeback feature .................................................................................. 72




1 - Demo Session 1 - SC ease of use and volume management Duration: 45 minutes

1.0 – Introduction With Dell Storage Manager (DSM) you now have a Many to One tool that manages our SC, PS and FS Series technologies. Be it monitoring, reporting, replication, provisioning or firmware updates you can perform the majority of configuration and daily tasks from within Dell Storage Manager. SCOS 7.0 also brings our PS series storage arrays under management and allows Cross Platform Replication between our SC and PS storage technologies. For PS series Management, a large amount of day to day functions can be delivered through DSM, provisioning, modification, resizing of volumes, assigning access to hosts, protecting with snapshots or replication can done via DSM. Initial system setup, advanced management and security options must be done via Group Manager. Eventually we will see full parity of function between Group Manager and DSM. We also have added block level Deduplication to go with our existing compression capability and introduced for the first time a Performance shaping Quality of Service feature

In this section of demo you will be performing the following tasks:

Review the DSM UI for SC and PS management

Review the DSM WebUI for SC management

Create a New Volume

Map a Volume to Server

View the Volume in Windows

Show Deduplication and Compression Talking Points DSM is based on Enterprise Manager so the look and feel is very similar. DSM will

become the primary management tool for the future.

SANHQ will continue it’s role as primary performance monitoring tool for the PS arrays

We will focus on our thin provisioning technology, Dynamic Capacity and the benefits it will provide to our customers

All our customers use Dynamic Capacity for the majority of their volumes, for certain high performance corner cases, a thick provisioned volume will be used but this is chasing a few final percentage points of system performance

Show how all operations are simple and wizard-driven but explain that nearly all tasks can equally be scripted (PowerShell or CompCU) for complete orchestration and we now have an API available for customers and technical partners to develop against.

We will see new features as we run through these first sections that will be covered later in detail.




Gotchas Although it is true that we do not pre-allocate space on the volume there are always

some pages pre-allocated in the page-pool in order to ensure high performance when receiving new writes. Be sure to use the correct language when describing the zero pre-allocation of space.

Create a volume that is 5Gb or smaller. Although Windows supports volumes larger than 2TB, the virtual SC has limitations and performance constraints that require smaller volumes. Remember we are trying to demonstrate simplicity and ease of use so the fewer steps the better.

Technical Selling Points Thin Provisioning provides the ability to allocate significantly more capacity than the

physical disk available, enabling maximum utilization of storage resources. Dynamic

Capacity only consumes physical capacity when data is written by the application.

This creates smaller, more efficient volume, increasing the performance of volume-

based operations.




Technical Objective Handling Question: Can’t all vendors create volumes and servers as simply as this? Answer: Not many can perform the tasks of creating a volume and a server and

mapping them together in such a simple workflow. Additionally if you perform the volume create in DSM then you can also configure replication/Live Volume as part of the initial volume creation.

Question: What is to stop runaway applications or users consuming storage? Is this not

a concern when over provisioning? Answer: Whilst this is a valid consideration, various mechanisms are in place to ensure

the system does not fill up to 100% capacity – these include:

Email and system alerts based on pre-defined thresholds (conservation mode etc.)

The ability to limit volume space consumption (volume properties)

Custom Thresholds and alerts defined in Dell Storage Manager

Automatic Phone Home & Copilot notification

It is also important to point out that although volumes ‘can’ be configured for any size, this does not always mean volumes ‘should’ be un-necessarily over inflated when provisioning. Small volumes still provide the same benefits when using Dynamic Capacity.

Question: If data is deleted from a Windows volume, is the space also freed on the SAN? Answer: For physical Windows Servers with operating systems prior to Server 2012, a

free space recovery agent is available that periodically runs to ‘free up’ dirty pages on the associated SC Volume.

For Windows Servers that are virtualised with VMware, an RDM in a physical compatibility mode is required to use the free space recovery agent.

For operating systems that natively support UNMAP, no agent is required. Current OS support includes Windows Server 2012, RHEL6+, VMware ESX5* *Although UNMAP is supported in VMware, this is for VMFS volumes only. If a VMDK is deleted from a VMFS volume the space is recovered using UNMAP. If data from a Windows Volume is deleted from a VMDK the space is not recovered as VMware currently does not support passing through the UNMAP command – this will change in a future release of VMware. Storage vMotion or a host based copy can be used to re-thin a volume if required.




1.1 - Signing into the Dell Storage Manager GUI 1. Double-click on the Dell Storage Manager Client icon on the Desktop and enter the

following details when prompted: Username: Admin Password: password.

Host/IP and Web Server port will be pre-populated and should not be changed.

1.2 – Reviewing the Dell Storage Manager Interface 1. From the Summary view, show how Dell Storage Manager can bring multiple SC

arrays under control

2. The Status and Summary panels collate important information about your infrastructure, its health, what you have under management and how it’s being utilized.




Note: You now have the ability to enable interaction with our ProSupport organisation from Dell Storage Manager via SupportAssist.

3. The Current Alerts can be cleared by clicking an alert to open the Monitoring tool,

Events can be cleared using the Acknowledge Alert button. Select all Alerts and click OK.

4. The Summary Tab can be modified using Views and added, removed or reordered




5. You can also manage complementary technologies of our SC series range, our Fluid File System, our Fluid Cache Cluster and or our PS Series arrays can be discovered, installed and managed using Dell Storage Manager




1.3 – Reviewing the Dell Storage Manager Web Interface We now HTML 5 web interface to supplement DSM, it’s accessed via the data

collector. As a 1.0 release it does not have feature parity but useful for those away from their main management system, those who are not the dedicated storage admin or somebody working with orchestration tools. Eventually we will see feature parity between this and the thick client.

1. From the desktop, click on DSM Web Clint shortcut. Log on with Admin with a

Password of password. Storage Manager can bring multiple SC arrays under control

2. As with the full client we start Status and Summary panels collate important information about your infrastructure, its health, what you have under management and how it’s being utilized.




Note: You can also customise the dashboard and have the ability to provide direct feedback to the development team

3. When viewing an individual system we have access to growth, usage and

performance information, items under management along with performance dynamic graphing

4. In the storage tab we can view storage, Server, Snapshot threshold etc tabs.




As well as information of the various volumes under management

5. Chose new volume and see how the volume options line up in the new UI versus the think client wizard




6. When we select an individual volume we see we have similar information tabs and volume actions available to us as from the thick client.

7. Performance monitoring is now available from most screens and can be focused to a specific components of the array. It now utilises dynamic graphing with an ability to view values by hovering




1.5 – PS Series Management within Dell Storage Manager 1. Right click Dell Storage and chose PS Series. The Add PS Group wizard comes up.

Here the Group iSCSI IP group and valid group admin details are entered to bring it under management. Since we already have the PS under management, click cancel

2. As with the SC we start with a summary of the PS group. The information has a look and

feel of the DSM gui even though the info presented is from familiar info points in Group Manager, these panels collate important information about your infrastructure, its health,




what you have under management and how it’s being utilized. You can also link and launch into Group Manager.

Discuss: Show how we can see the total amount of space within that group for an array or multiple arrays, we see free and delegated space, reserved space for snapshots and replication plus total values for the Group. We also see individual Storage Pools within a group plus any current alerts.

3. Under the Storage tab we see Volumes and Access Policies, both can be created and

edited from DSM.

Access polices allow us to prestage connection details for host or collections of hosts to allow easy assignment of volumes to iscsi hosts via initiators, ip or chap credentials.




4. Choosing volumes we see all volumes created listed from the PS. We also have a

Storage Chart that allows us to see consumption via a bar chart. You can chose what to view and modify the display format.

5. Click create volume, see how all options presented in the Group Manger wizard is available to you from this single pane. Click OK to create it.




6. Right click on the new volume and select Add Access Policies

7. Click the radio box beside DSM-Landing to assign the volume to this system using a

Access Policy. You can also apply it to any Snapshots created from this volume




8. When viewing a volume you can view info and use tabs to set the same Schedules, Snapshots, set Access, view Connections with all volume related actions available

9. Edit the pre-existing PS volume created with group manager, change the provision from thick to thin to show how historical elements are fully managed.







1.5 - Creating a new SC series volume 1. From the Summary view, right-click on the Demo Array, browse Tasks, Volumes and

select Create Volume.

2. Give the volume a suitable name (or accept the default) and size.

Note: Due to the nature of the Virtual SC, provisioning time to the OS is dependent on volume size, larger volumes are already pre-provisioned for other lab work




3. Click OK to accept the default Volume settings.

Note: We can open the discussion here on Storage Profiles, Snapshots, Data Reduction or QoS technologies but all will be covered in later lab modules

4. Click on the Storage Tab to view the newly created Volume.

1.6 - Mapping the volume to a server 1. Right click on the new Volume and click Map Volume to Server.




2. Select your Windows demo server and click Next.

Note: You can verify your windows server name by clicking the Start Menu button, right-clicking Computer, and selecting Properties.

3. Click Advanced on the verification window.

4. Click Finish when you have taken note of some of the options available in the

Advanced settings window.




5. Click the Mapping tab on the right-hand side to see the connections made between

the volume and the server.

6. Click the Statistics tab. Notice that New Volume 1 consumes zero space on the SAN, regardless of the size of the volume you created.

Note: When demoing be sure to view the volume properties before the disk is formatted. Disk formatting will cause some data to be written to disk.

1.6 - Viewing the volume in Windows 1. Double-click on the Rescan shortcut on the desktop.

2. Click the Computer Management icon from the desktop taskbar.




3. Select Disk Management from the left hand tree.

4. Scroll down thought the disks at the bottom, and look for the disk created.

Note: the disk is Unknown, Offline, and the volume is Unallocated.

5. Right-click on the Offline disk and select Online.

Note: the disk status changes from Offline to Uninitialized.

6. Right-click on the disk again and select Initialize Disk.

Note: the disk status changes from Not Initialized to Online.

7. Right-click on the Unallocated volume space to the right of the disk and select New

Simple Volume.

8. Walk through the New Simple Volume wizard and accept all of the defaults. On the Format Partition screen ensure that Perform a quick format is selected. Type New Volume for the Volume label.




Note: It will take some time for the format to complete if a Quick Format is not checked but it will make no difference to the space taken on the SAN. For this reason we always recommend using Quick Format.

9. Click Next and Finish to complete the New Volume Wizard. 10. Right-click the My Demo Volume and select Explore.

Note: this will open Windows Explorer.




11. Right-click the new Volume in Windows Explorer, and select Properties.

Note: A small MB value has been used to create and journal the NTFS filesystem.

12. In Dell Storage Manager, click the refresh button for the Statistics tab we looked at

earlier.

Note: Now that we have written a NTFS filesystem to the volume so is now consuming a small amount of space.




13. In Windows Explorer, browse the desktop that belongs to the lab environment. Browse the folder called 1GB_Data. Choose one or two of the test files, select Copy. Click on the new Volume we created, and Paste the data inside the volume. Refresh the volume Statistics again in Dell Storage Manager.

Note: Notice that the actual used space on the SAN is twice the size of the Volume Space used. Since the SC performs all new writes to RAID10 this is normal and later modules will detail how to demonstrate the tiering effect of the system.

1.7 – Using Deduplication and Compression

1. Deduplication and Compression is a global feature but applied to individual volumes. Either Compression only or Duplication and Compression can be set as a default. Edit setting for the volume you wish to apply the policy to.

Note: Data Reduction operation are tied to the nightly Data Progression cycle but customers will still benefit from On Demand Data Progression savings through RAID and Disk tiers. It is also a cumulative activity so it is possible that not all data eligible for Data Reduction will be processed on the day of creation.




2. If we browse to the Compression folder and volume we see can see that we’ve just compression enabled on this volume

Note: It is possible to apply Compression to all pages contained in a Snapshot or those which are Inaccessible Only, this would minimise any performance delays when rehydrating data being read.

3. If we browse the volume stats we can see that data has both progressed and been compressed with strong results




Note: This data is made up of.rtf documents which would have a high compression ratio, customer’s data and the expected benefit will vary but even with highly compressed file types (photo/video) our compression algorithms should still deliver a small improvement.

4. If we go to our DataReduction volume with Deduplication with Compression enabled

we can the results against the same data folder which has been duplicated twice.




Note: We are given values for the deduplication and compression ratio, the space and percentage saved. We can compare and contrast these against the Server Usage (What the OS believes is there) and Disk Usage which shows actual space consumed, snapshot and RAID overheads. Discussion points: Deduplication requires the presence of Flash drives in the disk folder to allow the creation of metadata. This metadata will have an overhead of .7% of the data deduplicated. We currently have a limit of 256TB of data that can be deduplicated with all other Snapshotted data on the array still eligible for compression




2 - Demo Session 2 - Data Protection Duration: 20 minutes

2.0 - Introduction In this demo you will be performing the following tasks:

Create a Manual Snapshot

Delete Files to Data Loss

Local Recovery

Delete View Volume

Create Replication

Viewing Replications Talking Points Our redirect-on-write snapshot method allows the creation of snapshots that

consume minimal storage space and the majority of snapshot overhead is typically on low-cost Tier3 disks.

While snapshot data becomes read-only, any new days, including modification to that read-only data will be written to Tier 1

Paired with On Demand Data Progression (ODDP) we use snapshots to action the movement of data to our Read Intensive Flash Tier.

Replay Manager allows for consistent snapshots of Windows, SQL, Exchange, Hyper-V and VM environments.

Gotchas Some of the older documentation refers to “Unlimited Snapshots”. Although the

snapshot limit is so high as to be effectively limitless for most customers be aware that there is actually a soft limit today and the terminology used should be “practically limitless”.

Be aware of the worst-case scenario for snapshots: that a tiny change to data (4k) could take 2MB on the SAN due to the page allocation. However explain to the customer that for applications that have this kind of write profile a 512K page could be used and that the snapshot overhead will typically reside on T3 disks.

Snapshots are crash-consistent unless an application-aware technology is being used to take them. Explain the benefits of Replay Manager.

Be sure to point out that SAN-based snapshots are not intended to replace traditional backups and should not be considered an E2E DR solution on their own. For single-system/single-site environments a traditional backup is still recommend for true DR coverage.




Technical Selling Points Snapshots are created without an initial clone and contain only written data, rather

than allocated but unused storage typical in other systems.

Remote Instant Replay replicates continuous Snapshots between local and remote sites, offering easy-to-implement disaster recovery at a very affordable price. With Remote Instant Replay, a practically unlimited amount of Snapshots can be created and easily replicated to one or more locations. This granularity enables small recovery intervals, allowing more recovery points to instantly recover from any point in time. Remote Instant Replay supports traditional Fibre Channel replication or cost-effective IP-based replication.

Technical Objective Handling Question: I want to take snapshots of individual VMs using the SC Series Snapshot

technology but this only snaps the entire datastore and not in a VM-consistent state. Answer: This capability is absolutely possible using the integrated Replay Manager 7

function provided by the CITV appliance. Question: How do I make sure that the snapshots I’m taking are consistent? Answer: By using Replay Manager. This allows you to take application-consistent

snapshots of Exchange, SQL, Hyper-V and VMware. For products outside of the scope of RM7 then you will need to perform some in-host consistency operation before triggering the Compellent snapshot. Our integration with Oracle’s RMAN is a good example of this.

Question: So if I’m using Snapshots I don’t need a backup strategy? Answer: Dell still recommends a traditional backup method for long-term protection of

data. SAN-based snapshots allow for rapid recovery of data and allow the traditional backup windows to be potentially reduced but not normally entirely replaced.

Question: Is there really no limit to the number of Snapshots I can take of a volume? Answer: Although there is no ‘Hard’ limit on platform, the number of Snapshots you can

take will be dependent on two factors: a) The data change rate b) Available capacity in the system

Data-Instant-Replay stores delta level changes between snapshots, if the rate of change between Snapshots is zero; the consumed space from that Snapshot is also zero.

Question: Is there a performance hit when using Snapshots? Answer: For most environments that have a typical R/W profile (70% read / 30% write)

the associated performance hit is minimal. Dell Compellent uses redirect-on-write as opposed to copy-on-write technology and actually recommends the use of Snapshots for all volumes (except log volumes, paging files, etc.) within the system as this helps to drive additional efficiencies when combined with Data-Progression.




2.1 - Creating a Manual Snapshot 1. Open Dell Storage Manager GUI, right-click your demo volume, select Create

Snapshot.

2. Click OK to create the Snapshot. Leave all settings as default.

3. Click the Snapshots tab to see the volume’s current Snapshots including the manual

Snapshot we just created.




2.2 - Using the Manual Snapshot to recover from data loss 1. Open Windows Explorer.

Navigate to your Demo Volume and delete some of the files copied earlier.

2. In the Snapshot tab, right-click the manual Snapshot and select Create Volume from

Snapshot.

Note: Check the Description field to ensure that it is the manual Snapshot you configured




3. Click OK to complete. Leave all settings as default, note that this is referred to a View Volume.

4. Right click on the View Volume to map the Snapshot to the server.

Select the Windows Demo Server

5. Click Finish on the summary to complete the wizard and accept defaults.




6. Double-click the Rescan shortcut located on the Desktop.

7. Open Windows Disk Management. Right click the new volume and select Online.

Note: The recovered disk is already initialized and formatted with a NTFS filesystem. The server will recognize the volume and will assign the next sequential drive letter automatically.

8. Right-click the Snapshot volume we just put Online and select Explore.

Notice that data we deleted previously is able to be accessed on the Snapshot volume.

9. Copy the data we deleted previously and paste it to the original Demo Volume.

10. In Dell Storage Manager, click on the View of New Volume 1 1 Snapshot volume

Statistics tab




Note: The Snapshot volume has 219MB of data in it. However, it only consumes a few MB of Tier 1 space on the SC. The data that was written to the volume is now in a Read Only state and has been moved to Raid 5 to release capacity back into Tier1l. This is Data Progression in operation.




2.3 - Deleting the Manual Snapshot volume 1. Right-click the Demo Volume View 1 and select Delete.

2. Click OK to confirm deletion.

Note: It would be best practices in a production environment to unmap the volume prior to deleting it but it not necessary for the purposes of this demo.

3. Double-click the Rescan shortcut on the desktop.




2.3 – Showing how to set and use a Snapshot Profile 1. Right-click the Demo Volume View 1 and select Set Snapshot Profile.

2. We can see that the Daily profile has been applied and is the minimum

recommended to activate features such as Data Progression.

Check the box beside the Sample Snapshot Profile




3. We can see it add 3 new Rules to the profile, A Daily every 12 hours, a Weekly and a Monthly Snapshot with increasing retention periods.

Discussion: This is knows as a Son, Father and Grandfather policy with greater frequency of Snapshots for recent data but only kept for a short while, collected into a weekly snapshot retained for 5 weeks and then a monthly snapshot kept for 6 months. Customising the frequency of snapshots and retention period to suit the Risk Profile and importance of the customer’s data set allows for robust, space efficient retention of data long term.




2.4 - Creating a Replication 1. Right click on your correct Storage Center.

Select Tasks > Replication > Replicate Volumes.

2. Select a replication destination Storage Center and click Next.

Note: If more than one array is listed, select either one.

3. Select your New Volume 1 as the volume to replicate. Click Next.




4. Click Next to accept the default settings on the Replication Attributes window.

Note: If Replicate Active Snapshot select, replication will copy all writes from the active Snapshot area of the volume. If Deduplication is selected, replication will copy only the changed portions of the Snapshot history on the source volume. However, this extra optimization is resource intensive.

5. Click Finish to complete the wizard.




2.4 - Creating Cross Platform Replication (XPR) between a SC and PS array 1. We create a replication relationship after adding a PS by right clicking on the SC,

Actions, Replication and Configure iSCSI Connections.

2. After choosing the PS you’ll replicate, you can chose a Fault domain to connect over.

You provide information on the link type between them, the Storage Pool to use and the Delegated Space to use on the PS

Note: The FD must be on the same IP range as the PS group. Only 1 FD will participate but this still is fully redundant when configured as per best practices.




3. We can chose a PS volume, right click and select replication from the menu

4. Chose the remote SC, click next

5. Set the remote copy volume name, For PS to SC you can set Storage Type to

replicate to and set the expiration windows and click Finish to create the volume




6. Navigate to the SC we replicated to, expand Remote PS Group and view the volumes replicated from the PS group.

Discussion point: Customers can use this integration in several ways, for example replicate the PS environment to the SC for DR purposes and continue production on PS. Or they could move the primary workloads to the SC and the PS becomes the secondary system to deliver against secondary roles such as Test and development. Or they could utilise the flexibility of the PS technology to redeploy the members from the original group to multiple sites and work as a ROBO model with the SC as the central storage technology that multiple PS groups replicate into.




2.5 - Viewing Replications 1. Click Replications & Live Volume in the bottom left-hand navigation pane.

2. All current Replications, SC or PS are shown with status information

3. Browse the Replication jobs you have just created and the current properties and

status will be shown in the bottom pane. Details on the Progress, Snapshots and other related information can be viewed from here

4. Compare and contrast the information and options available to you when viewing a PS to SC replication job versus a SC to SC replication Job




Note: With SC to SC replication you can view considerable more information with regards to progress and IO reports.




3 - Demo Session 3 – Live Volume Duration: 10 minutes

3.0 - Introduction In this demo you will be performing the following tasks:

Create a Replication between your Primary and Secondary arrays

Convert this Replication to a Live Volume instance

Set a Live Volume Quality of Service

Change your Live Volume from Async to Sync

Swap your Live Volume between your arrays

Viewing Replications Talking Points Live Volume delivers dynamic business continuity. It can help keep applications

online and data accessible during planned or unplanned downtime.

Live Volume provides a layer of virtualization that enables a physical server or a virtual machine to share a virtual storage volume between two SC arrays in semi-synchronous and synchronous configurations.

From 6.7 it supports Automated Fail Over when used with VMware Metrocluster

Its Use Cases include Automatic Storage Migration between virtualised environments, Zero downtime maintenance, Disaster avoidance and on Demand load distribution.

Gotchas Live Volume is currently supported on our SC9000, SC8000, SC40 Arrays, support

came to the SC4020 with the release of 6.6. The SC2000 does not support Live volume

This is not a Disaster Recovery operation, while it has a place in minimising disruption when recovering from a system or datacentre failure, it is not a primary protection tool.

Automatic fail-over of workloads requires the use of a Witness system that should be held on a third site

With the release of SCOS 7.1 we will see Automatic Failover support for Microsoft physical and Hyper-V environments,

Technical Selling Points Live Volume now supported Managed Replication, with this, a Live Volume shared

between two SC arrays can be replicated to a third SC at a DR site.

Flexible Replication Policy Management, Replications can be changed to Live Volumes and back again and both can be moved between Synchronous and Asynchronous modes on the fly.




3.1 - Creating a Replication 7. Right click on your correct Storage Center.

Select Tasks > Replication > Replicate Volumes.

8. Select a replication destination Storage Center and click Next.

Note: If more than one array is listed, select either one.

9. Select a previously created volume as the volume to replicate. Click Next.




10. Click Next to accept the default settings on the Replication Attributes window.

11. Click Finish to complete the wizard.




3.2 – Converting a Replicated Volume to a Live Volume 5. Click Replications & Live Volume in the bottom left-hand navigation pane.

6. All current Replications are shown. Select the Replication job you have just created

and chose Convert to Live Volume

7. If asked, create a dedicated Live Volume Quality of Service entry

8. Give the QoS a name and define the Link Speed. Leave as default and click Next

Note: A QoS is used to define the speed of the line to be used for Replication or Live Volume operations, it also ensures that bandwidth is utilised to the relevant limit schedule.




9. Select your SC’s to use as Source and Destination. Under Destination Volume Attributes, click on Change and point it to the demo landing system. Give QoS a name and define the Link Speed. Accept defaults and click Next.

Note: Your QoS is listed as default. You have an option to Automatically Swap Roles, this can be used in a Federated Workload scenario, with activity deciding which SC can best meet the performance/capacity needs of the workload.

10. Chose which SC to contain the Restore Points.

11. Chose which SC to contain the Restore Points. Click OK to complete the wizard




12. Go to the Live Volumes tab and review the information shown there.




3.3 – Converting a Live Volume to Synchronous mode

1. From 6.5, we now have the ability swap Live Volume between Asynchronous and Sync modes without have to destroy and recreate the pairing. Clink on Edit Settings from the Live Volumes tab and chose the Synchronous radio button.

Note: You have Sync Mode options when choosing synchronous replication. High Availability means the secondary copy will be available to online in a link system/link failure scenario. High Consistency is for situations where ensuring the mirrored copies have no divergence during a system/link failure, often for legal compliance or regulatory reasons. If the mirror is broken for whatever reason, both copies will go off line.




3.4 – Using Live Volume to swap Primary Storage Center

Two of the main use cases for Live Volume is Business Continuance between sites where workloads can be migrated proactively to minimise disruptions such as Firmware updates or DC upgrades. It can also be used to enable Storage Federation, where multiple SC’s are designed to fufile a specific role such as High Performance, General Purpose or Dense Data, each system would utilise a series of technologies such as All Flash, Hybrid or our SC280 Disk Enclosure to deliver on the relevant need. Live Volume will enable that workload to migrate between this systems without interruption to the Application server.

1. Make note of the Primary and Secondary Storage Center Names. Highlight the Live Volume previously created and click on Swap Primary Storage Center of Live Volume

2. Confirm the Swap members and click OK.




4 - Demo Session 4 - Reporting, Alerting and Managing Duration: 20 minutes

4.0 - Introduction With Dell Storage Manager, all local and remote Storage Center systems are discovered using a single console. This centralized interface provides a complete view of all aspects of the Storage Center environment, significantly reducing storage administration time. In this demo you will be performing the following tasks:

How do I see what’s going on in the system?

Alerts and Thresholds Configuration

Performance Monitoring and Quality of Service

Reporting

Chargeback (Optional Section)

Talking Points Dell Storage Manager provides the ability to display storage utilization on the Storage

Center system over a period of time, including summaries from last week, last month, or last year.

Dell Storage Manager is able to monitor all local and remote Storage Center systems, allowing comparable views of systems in terms of overall system storage, configuration of storage to servers, and storage resource objects for each resource.

Dell Storage Manager summarizes I/O usage on the Storage Center system over a period of time, including summaries from last week, last month, or last year.

Dell Storage Manager’s extensive system monitoring provides immediate insight into Storage Center environments. System reports present storage management information including summaries for capacity utilization, replications and events, allowing strategic storage decisions to be made easily.

Dell Storage Manager provides the ability to e-mail storage reports daily, weekly and/or monthly in any number of standard formats.

Alerts generated from all local and remote Storage Center systems are forwarded to Dell Storage Manager, helping administrators to identify and resolve problems faster. Alerts can be exported, sorted, located and cleared. NB: Note that clearing alerts from Dell Storage Manager does not clear them on the Storage Center system(s).

Log files from Storage Center systems can be viewed from Dell Storage Manager. Log files can be exported, sorted, located and filtered.




Gotchas IO views are updated fairly regularly but the Storage views are not. So be sure to

show information here that is longer term.

Technical Selling Points Dell Storage Manager simplifies capacity planning and increases storage purchase

efficiency.

Dell Storage Manager helps optimize performance by providing important I/O details.

Technical Objective Handling Question: I don’t want to use DSM to monitor my system, I want to use my existing

monitoring tools. Answer: Compellent supports SMI-S, SNMP and scripting to pull system information. We

have integrations with products like SCOM in order for you to monitor the system from other tools.




4.1 - Using Dell Storage Manager for monitoring and alerts 1. Click Monitoring in the bottom left-hand navigation pane.

2. The right hand pane will display the various Alerts.

3. Toggle through each of the tabs at the top to view historical events




4. Click Storage on the bottom left.

5. Click the Summary tab to show the current Storage status. Scroll down to look at the various reports.

Note: Since 6.6 more information has been added to the default reports, we have also integrated SupportAssist activities on the Status panel

6. At the very bottom is a Top 10 Fastest Growing Volumes report. Highlight this report as an example of how easy it is to access to vital data.




4.2 - Monitoring performance 1. Click the IO Usage tab to show an overview of the system’s performance.

2. Use the check boxes at the bottom of the graph to show how the data can be

filtered.

3. Use the explorer view on the left to show the performance details for a different

objects such as: Volumes, Controllers, Ports, Profiles, Disk pools and Disks. 4. Click on the View icon at the top of the object hierarchy and click Comparison View

5. Select all disks of a type. Click Update.




Demonstrate both the Comparison view and that the load is equally spread across all disks.




4.3 - Performing real-time analysis 1. Click on the Charting tab to start recording performance analysis data.

Click the drop down menu at the top to display different time windows.

2. Open Windows Explorer and copy some data on a Volume so that the SAN performs

some I/O operations.

3. Explore the graphs to show that data is immediately displayed in the Charting viewer.

This is a great, free, resource that can be used to perform real-time analysis.




4.3 – Using performance Quality of Service Our new performance QoS allows us to shape traffic to volumes by about or IO or MB per second either individually or as part of a group policy. Customers have different workloads and wants to ensure that the important workloads will perform to their needs and that lower importance workloads won’t interfere with those. They now have the ability to set relative values or specific IO or MB values and these values can be changed on the fly without interruption to volume access.

It also prevents the possibility of a noisy neighbour, an unplanned or unauthorized aggressive load hitting your tier one infrastructure and consuming the available performance. It is also very useful in multi-tenancy environments where you can set limits against different tenants with a cumulative value between their volumes using Group QoS

1. Got to the storage tab and we see that we have QoS profiles to work with at the

bottom of the central pane.

From here we can Create QoS profiles for Volume Specific or a Group QoS profile that sets a cumulative ceiling against a collection of volumes with individual prioritizing.

2. Chose the Volume QoS Profile Radio box, note how we can set the Relative Priority

for use in a group.




Set the IO Value here to 250, we need to set a low value due to the training environment being virtualised and often supporting 10’s of vSC instances.

3. Expand the Volume QoS profiles, right click on the new profile and chose Apply to

Volume




4. Expand the QoS Folder and put a check by the QoS Volume 1 and click OK

5. Go to the desktop and double click the QoS Workload Shortcut to open IOmeter, navigate to the Results Display tab and click the Green Flag to start the workload

6. Return to DSM and view the QoS volume from the Charting Tab




Note: The purple line indicating the allowed IO level and how our load is conforming.

7. Edit the setting of the QoS Volume 1 and click change the Volume QoS Profile

8. Chose a higher 500 IO QoS Volume Profile and click OK to apply the changes.

9. Return to the charting view and not how the Max IOPS Allowed indicator has

increased along with the workload numbers.




Note: As the IO went up, we saw the latency go down, this is due to the QoS process using latency injection to throttle the workload.




4.4 - Configuring Alerts and Thresholds 1. Click Threshold Alerts in the bottom left-hand navigation pane.

2. Click the Definitions tab. Click Create Threshold Definition on the top right.

3. Click the Type drop-down menu to demonstrate the different types of Alerts that can

be created: IO Usage, Storage, and Replication. 4. Click the Alert Object Type to demonstrate the granularity of the alerts possible. 5. Create an example alert to show that alerts can be applied across all the Storage

Centers that Dell Storage Manager is managing or just a subset.




4.5 - Querying past events 1. Click the Queries tab and demonstrate that queries can be run instantly or saved for

future use.

2. Define a query as per the below picture. Definition: Storage, Storage Type Tier, Actual Space and use a 1GB Threshold Value. Click Run.

4.6 – Dell Storage Manager Reporting 1. Click the Reports tab and and click on Edit Automated Report Settings




2. We can chose the Summary sections for our report and define Daily, Weekly and Monthly report cycles.

Within those timelines we can chose the report type grouped by IO Reports and Storage Reports.

3. We can chose a location on the network for the generated reports to be stored

And have to option to mail the reports and chose the file type format for the reports to be rendered in. Chose to Generate Reports Now and then OK to exit.

4. Click on the newest timestamped Monthly report, see the tabs that line up to the choices we made in settings.




we will see information in chart and table form. The System Summary Report shows an overview of consumption and entities under management.

5. Walk the customer thorough the tabs and reports to show they information contained in the report and how the output might be multi-page.




4.7 – Optional Lab - Using the Chargeback feature 1. Click Chargeback in the bottom left-hand navigation pane.

2. Click Edit Chargeback Settings.

3. Demonstrate the ease of configuration and flexibility of the function.




4. Click the Add Department to show how simple it is to create new Departments and define pricing structures.

5. Click the Chargeback Runs tab and select the last Manual Run point.

6. Click the Departments tab to show an overview of the systems Chargeback is

currently configured for.




7. Click Add Volume and Add Volume Folders on the top right to demonstrate ease of configuration.

8. Show the “Add Line Item” option to demonstrate that non-array related items can be

added.

Documents

Dell Storage Manager SC Series vLAB - Amazon S3 · 1.5 – PS Series Management within Dell Storage Manager 1. Right click Dell Storage and chose PS Series. The Add PS Group wizard